Greenbuild, the annual international conference of the U.S. Green Building Council, wound down today in Boston with 11 tours of green properties from Cambridge to Cape Cod to fill a long Saturday. The full-day trips included visits to green tech as well as historic sites, homes and schools. A list of all the tours sites during the conference can be found here. An interactive map showing the green attributes of each site is here.

The formal closing, however, was Friday with a rousing wrap-up speech by USGBC President, CEO and Founding Chair Rick Fedrizzi, who pulled together the many threads of the nearly weeklong event.

In deference to the host city as well as the momentum of green building advocacy, the banner theme of this year's gathering was "Revolutionary Green." And of the many points — from the technical to the motivational — that five days of meetings, workshops, discussion forums, plenaries, site visits and no fewer than 106 education sessions sought to address, the conference offerings were largely informed by three major questions:

-- Has the economic crisis killed the green building movement?
-- If not, how will it survive?
-- When will the movement diversify itself and its agenda to address social justice issues?

"After all we've seen these last few days and all we've heard, I think we have our answer," Fedrizzi said. "When people say 'Is it over,' you tell them there were 29,752 people at Greenbuild."

"When people ask is the green building movement going to survive the recession, you'll say we are how the economy will get back on track — with green jobs, green energy and green innovation," he said to applause and cheers. "And when people ask whether green matters in times like these, you'll quote the Archbishop Desmond Tutu who said (in his keynote address) on Wednesday that not to care about the environment is like not caring about egregious human rights violations. Our green revolution is in full play and we are clearly changing the world."

Calling this year's Greenbuild a watershed event for the green building movement, Fedrizzi said one of the bigger revelations acknowledged in the conference was a realization the movement has made about itself.  "Maybe most importantly, we finally connected the dots about how integral the values of social equity are with what we do," he said.

"The social equity thread that ran through the last three days was a bright one of hope," said Fedrizzi, with a bow to author and environmental activist Van Jones' vision of a vibrant green collar economy and the work of MacArthur Fellow Majora Carter, whose founding of Sustainable South Bronx has fueled a broader drive to reclaim communities.

Greenbuild's video of Fedrizzi's speech and the closing plenary, "Science in Sustainability," can be viewed here. The two-hour closing presentation features a discussion with scholar, naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner E.O. Wilson and Janine Benyus, the founder of the Biomimicry Institute and cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild. NPR president Kevin Klose moderated the talk.

The talks by Jones, Carter and other major speakers at Greenbuild can be found here.